Midi Karaoke Songs With Lyrics
Quirino Palomo
If you are using the Choir instrument then the 'voices' are controlled by the MIDI notes the same as any other MIDI instrument - these you can either create manually in the MIDI Editor or by playing a MIDI keyboard.
This is not entirely true. There are ways to add lyrics to Midi Files, something which is done with files intended for karaoke. A number of DAWs can do this - Cubase, Sonar for instance). I've no idea if this is possible in "Music Studio". Perhaps more likely in Samplitude Music Studio.
I can see that it can display them and you can add a lyrics marker but I can't see any way of actually adding or editing lyrics. I guess a karaoke program would be needed although I believe that Sonar is quite good at this. At least you'll then be able to see the lyrics in Music Studio.
So the answer is - put lyric markers in and then go to the marker manager where you can then create and edit the lyrics. I will be looking at other programs to do this though as seems a little bit cumbersome in Music studio.
I am currently creating an app that plays music. I would like to add a feature that shows the music lyrics while the music plays, with the current position of the text marked to match the current position in the song. The Bouncing Ball effect, just like you see on every Karaoke screen as the song plays.I have been looking into extending my caf files, adding "string chunks" and then reading them out again. Is this the correct way to do this? Does anybody know of a better/easier/normal way to achieve my goal?As I am not sure how I would synchronize everything, I would be happy for any suggestions, code examples or helpful comments. Maybe somebody has done this before and would be happy to advise me.
The .kar extension just signifies that a standard midi file contains lyric information. To build your karaoke player you need to do two things: play the instrument part of the midi file and display the lyrics.
You would need to access midi meta messages with codes 0x01 (text) or 0x05 (lyric). These messages store the lyric data as a series of hex numbers where each hex number represents an ascii character.
You would need to loop over the MIDI file and extract the text lyrics with their time stamps. Then you could display a section of lyrics ahead of time and change the colour or do a bouncing ball effect as the lyrics became due.
Unfortunately, lyrics export has not been implemented for MIDI yet, nor is it likely to be soon because the format is so limited (as soon as you add lyrics to a second voice or verse the export becomes nontrivial).
However, MuseScore is the best karaoke machine there is, and it's free, so why not send them the MSCZ files and a link to download MuseScore? Even if they can't read music they can still follow along with the lyrics. They can control playback with the Play Panel and use the Mixer to mute other sections of the choir.
I have been creating MIDI files, so members of my choir can use them for practice purposes. MIDI has the advantage that the format has been around a long time, and most devices can handle it. (MP3 is OK but, of course, doesn't include the lyrics, and the files are a lot bigger.) For each song, I prepare five MIDI files - one for each voice, and one for the whole song.
A few of the choir are musically and technologically literate; they can import the files into whatever music software they prefer, and I have been urging them to try MuseScore. Some are reasonably competent with music notation, but less so with software; they incline to use e.g. Notation Player.
The largest number are both technophobic and have poor music-reading abilities. Given that the choir's average age is nearer 70 then 60, it's an uphill struggle to try to get them to use anything but the simplest software. For them, I recommend vanBasco's MIDI player.
The ideal software, for our choir, would display the score with the lyrics, as well as allowing control of playback in the manner of vanBasco's MIDI player. I realise that MuseScore does just that, but getting a bunch of technophobes to install it isn't easy. I can give MSCZ files a try, but not many will use them, I'm afraid.
I'm part of a choir too so I understand your problem! I used to export MP3s with the relevant voice emphasized, but that was too much work so now I tend to upload one of the files to MuseScore.com and send out a link to the video score (like this one) so that the less technologically minded people can get used to the idea of following along on the computer without having to go to the trouble of downloading and installing a program. I send the MSCZ files along with the link and tell them that they can download MuseScore if they want to mute individual voices.
I use Synthesizer-V for virtual singing of MuseScore scores, too. MIDI is intermediary between the two apps. My problem is that MuseScore MIDI does not include lyrics, so I have been manually re-entering them in Synthesizer-V. However, apparently, this problem may be solvable. Namely, the problem of MuseScore and MIDI lyrics is that it is not implemented the ability to embed lyrics into MIDI, yet. However, I heard that Sibelius and Encore MIDI files do contain lyrics and they ca be opened in some other apps that require Lyrics, such as, Synthesizer-V. Similarly MIDI exported from Dorico apparently does not, either. However, the solution has been suggested in case of Dorico. Apparently, Dorico can export MusicXML, that contains lyrics. So, the user used some online services to convert the Dorico MusicXML to MIDI that contained lyrics. Then, Synthesizer-V was able to import the lyrics from the MIDI file. I haven't tried the method, but, since I know that MusicXML exported from MuseScore also contains lyrics, I think that this method using MusicXML as intermediary must work??? However, I think that the ability of MuseScore automatically embedding lyrics into MIDI is a well-deserved new feature request.
Karaoke CD+G Creator is a tool of choice for many professionals to create CD+G karaoke songs. And with its easy to use graphical interface it can be serve even beginners to author their CD+Gs. And with MIDI software synthesizer creating great sounding backing tracks for your karaoke creations is also a very simple task.
MIDI files contain music in condensed format, instructing computer on what notes should be played, what instruments to use, etc. All soundcards can play MIDI, but the quality of the playback differs. Software MIDI synthesizer converts MIDI format to WAV or MP3, making it usable in any scenario you want.
First you have to start MIDI import wizard by selecting Import MIDI karaoke wizard from File menu. Karaoke CD+G Creator will prompt you to download and install software MIDI converter. It will take a while and you will be presented with a Import MIDI window.
Now you have to choose the MIDI file you would like to convert. Make sure that Software synthesizer is selected. Processing may take a while, but after it is finished you will be presented with familiar soundtrack view in Karaoke CD+G Creator.
Another great thing about MIDI karaoke is that a lot of it contain already synchronized lyrics, which of course are recognized by Karaoke CD+G Creator and imported with their timing instructions, making the most tiresome process of creating karaoke songs non-existent. You may play the song and make sure that everything got imported correctly and that the words are in sync. You may also remove some of the text, as MIDI karaoke sometimes contain additional textual information.
Enhance your karaoke experience with our MIDI Karaoke Player integration! Karaoke CD+G Creator now offers seamless compatibility with MIDI files, allowing you to effortlessly import and convert MIDI karaoke tracks into stunning CD+G creations. With our intuitive Import MIDI karaoke wizard, you can quickly transform MIDI files into synchronized lyric displays, eliminating the hassle of manual timing adjustments. Elevate your karaoke productions today and enjoy high-quality playback with Power CD+G Player.
I'd like to use javascript to extract from a midi file: lyrics + related time stamps.Of course, I'd like to have the time stamps as absolute time in seconds from the beginning of the song. As far as I understand, the native midi format provides times in the form of relative times (delta vs previous event in the list), measured in ticks (rather than seconds).So what I've found & achieved so far is the following:
I can use the midi-parser-js library to parse a midi file and retrieve the lyrics & delta times. -parser-jsI can somehow compute the absolute times in seconds when the tempo doesn't evolve, or when tempo changes are conveniently located. As soon as tempo changes occur between notes, I cannot seem to find the proper formula, which looks awfully complex, and the more I search, the further I get from the solution.
I think that the difficulty partly lies in that the tempo is located in a separate track, and as a result, delta times retrieved from the lyrics track do not take the tempo changes into account. So I thought that parsing a midi file in format 0 (rather that format 1) would help, since all events would be merged into the same track, but the tempo still seems to be on a separate "track 0", rather than in "track 1" with the lyrics events.
So I found another javascript library, Tone.js, that provides a midi parser: seems almost perfect, because it provides absolute times in seconds (and also note durations, which are not available as such in the native midi format).However, this library doesn't seem to expose the lyrics data! (or if it does, I couldn't find how).The user discussion / support forum for this library seems to be down.
... To make it easy for the synchronizer to extract this data from a MIDI File, tempo information should always be stored in the first MTrk chunk. For a format 0 file, the tempo will be scattered through the track and the tempo map reader should ignore the intervening events; for a format 1 file, the tempo map must be stored as the first track.
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